I don't think there is a rule against non-English games, but consider that the majority of people visiting this convention are Americans or English language native speakers and that that is their only language they know.
So, if you want ~90% of the people not being able to understand your game, go ahead.

It also depends on how text heavy your game is. If it's an RPG it's probably not a good idea to put it on here untranslated~
If it's a platformer, at least translate the most important things such as in-game menus and help files etc. so it's playable.

A very good question, one that I don't think has ever came up before! The answer is pretty much the above two posts.
If it's not very text heavy (like the usual Mario game), then it's really not a problem.

However, if there's a lot of text there are a few things to consider:
- NCFC is an English-speaking event, so in most cases the audience isn't going to understand another language, which means its pretty strange to submit a non-English booth.
- Most likely, the staff aren't going to be able to understand your game, which means we might have to reject it out of abuse concerns. I'd like to accept these kind of things on good faith, but you know how the internet can be!

I don't want to outright reject anything non-English, but we really don't have the resources for supporting every language out there. I think if you have an English version in addition to the original language it's probably a non-issue, but I know that's probably a lot of effort that just isn't worth it for most people. I really would like to accommodate these things, but I just don't think it's possible.

Well, I'm about a month late in commenting on this topic, but I think it's worth it!

It's common, in commercial game design, to actually have a table of all your strings so that you can easily swap them out for alternate translations. This is a design feature that programmers should always consider if they want to give people from other countries the same opportunity as people from their own country--which, given that the internet is international, is a really good thing to do these days.

That said, even if you haven't set up your game with string tables, you could search for all the strings using the string delimiter for the programming language you're using (usually double quotation marks, but sometimes it's single quotation marks, like in PHP) and stick your text into Google Translate. It's not perfect, but it will usually give other-language-speakers a fairly good idea of what your game says.

If you want the translation to be good, you can mess around with the Google Translate results (translate both forward and backward) and possibly even submit your text, with more thorough descriptions in the case of short strings, to someone who natively speaks the language you're translating to, or even better, to a bilingual person.

(08-29-2011 10:23 AM)Guinea Wrote: consider that the majority of people visiting this convention are Americans or English language native speakers and that that is their only language they know.

I'm pretty sure there's also a big crowd from outside of the native English speakers, seeing that I'm Dutch myself.

1. Even if the sum of all non-American people were greater than the amount of Americans, that still doesn't mean they're all speaking the same language.
2. The least common denominator is still English.
3. I'm from Austria and I still expect every game I play on the internet to feature the English language.

If there's a big enough interest for games in a certain language, then we can consider that for next year. It's definitely not something I'm totally against, but I don't think we could really prepare something like that for this year even if enough interest showed up.

Supporting multiple languages requires... well... a duplicate set of NCFC staff. For every language. That's if it were to be done well, as you'd need to have at least two quality control people to sort out booths and potentially more to translate. It could be done, but not with only a month to go.

With MFGG we tend to let things slide a little when it comes to multiple languages. As long as there's an English translation too, we tend to act in good faith that the one we can't read is fine. Same would probably apply here, but the key part of that sentence is "as long as there's an English translation too". This year at least, NCFC is an English site.

Okay, now I am working on an English Version of my game, so
you can understand it when you play it.^^
This is my current booth:http://www.nintendocfc.com/booth.html?id=14
(With german screens, which you can change when you are playing)

(10-19-2011 09:26 AM)-Rayo- Wrote: Okay, now I am working on an English Version of my game, so
you can understand it when you play it.^^
This is my current boot:http://www.nintendocfc.com/booth.html?id=14
(With german screens, which you can change when you are playing)

Maybe you shouldn't go around posting links to your booth before NCFC started, but that's just my opinion. Other than that, the game looks quite good so far.